“We don’t have enough time,” I had said to my daughter as she ducked into the gift store on Toronto’s Bloor Street – just to look, of course. I had a million things to do after her ballet class, and Christmas shopping with a four-year-old was not on the list.
But then I saw it, and time stopped. The ceramic tree behind the counter was a near replica of the one my grandma owned – hers, one she had made with her bridge ladies decades before I was born. I could hear her calm voice and feel her soft hands guiding me away from the tree’s bright bulbs, each nestled in a pocket of painted snow, and always too hot to touch.
I could feel the comfort of sitting on her lap in the wingback chair, admiring her ceramic tree in the front window of the fancy sitting room, off limits to her grandkids any other time of year. The Victorian furniture. The plush floral carpet. If I closed my eyes long enough, I could see her eyes twinkle as we spoke; I could hear her shoulder-shaking laugh.
“Mama, why are you crying?”
It’s nothing, I told my daughter as she bolted down another aisle. My mind has gone back to that tree, those moments with my grandma, every Christmas. The sadness I feel that she – and so many others – aren’t with us is a rite of passage into December. The missing and the magic mixed into one bittersweet, forlorn feeling that is somehow festive to me.
The hurt is not just about personal loss – it’s about injustice, too. The guilt of living in abundance here, and not clinging on to life there, feels more palpable. What right do I have to be overwhelmed about a Christmas holiday, when so many children have been torn from their homes this year, never to return – or worse? How can I sigh at my husband for playing the worst Christmas music – yes, of course the people in Africa know it’s Christmas – when so many loved ones aren’t with us any more, and so many are fighting for basic survival?
The melancholy and guilt and nostalgia are all wrapped up together like Christmas lights I’ll never untangle. And though I don’t want my kids to feel unhappy – in fact, I go to great lengths to ensure this is their most wonderful time of year – I do want them to feel some of these less-bright parts of Christmas: gratitude, reflection and, okay, maybe feel a bit sad for others who don’t have as much, instead of simply seeing Christmas as an opportunity to ask for more, more, more. I wish my kid would put down the toy catalogue and understand a deeper meaning of the season; is that too much to ask?
“Gratitude is actually the opposite of entitlement, and you can absolutely teach your kids to know there is nuance and sadness at Christmas,” says Dona Matthews, a developmental psychologist in Toronto, and author of Imperfect Parenting – a handbook on creating kids who are, among other things, grateful and understanding of the world around them.
She says parents need to be honest about why Christmas brings us all down sometimes, and name our complicated feelings out loud. If, for example, your child sees a person asking for money on the street, Matthews says, “it’s okay to tell them that person doesn’t have what he needs by way of food and shelter. We are so lucky [to] have a warm house and food to eat.”
She says we can teach kids about the cruelty and injustice of the world by speaking about our good fortune in contrast with the less fortunate, and then encouraging kids – even at 4 – to try to do something about it: donate to a food bank, give money or gift cards to a person on the street, or take their too-small clothes to a shelter.
“They can learn firsthand that they can make the world a better place – that’s the next step in the gratitude project,” Matthews says.
Gratitude and reflection – the things I’m needing most for my kids – are also achieved, she says, by saying no and not giving them the most things at Christmas – even when we all want to make merry. “If you want Veruca Salt for a child,” she says, “just give them everything they ask for.”
I won’t tell her about my daughter, hands full of knick-knacks in the toy store, begging for a bejewelled reindeer and gingerbread chapstick.
I told her to put it all back, though she’s grown up in a world where materialistic overconsumption is the norm, and she understands anything she wants can theoretically arrive at her doorstep the next day. It’s no wonder, then, that she views Christmas as an endless fire hose of stuff, when all of her parents’ holiday packages keep multiplying in our entranceway.
And yet, if TikTok is to be believed, “underconsumption core” is actually having a moment: that is, the Gen Z aesthetic trending on the social-media app shows carefully curated young people showing off how they live with less, buy very little and reject messaging from big corporations that you need more stuff.
It’s a message millennial parents – and their kids – seemingly haven’t heard. In the U.S., holiday spending has steadily increased every year – with 2024 , and millennials – specifically, those with young kids – leading the spending charge.
According to a Harris poll, Gen Z may be watching those “less is more” videos but their holiday spending is extraordinary: A Gen Z shopper spends an average of US$1,638 – more than double their boomer counterpart.
How can anyone expect to sit with the sadness of the season when we are all consuming too much – myself (and my daughter) included?
“Mama, can we go home?”
A Gen Z trend that is truly making a comeback is colourful, vintage décor – or so the store clerk told me as she wrapped up my purchase, with my impatient daughter pulling at my coat.
“I got us something,” I said to my daughter when we got in the door. “I thought you said no more stuff,” she wisely observed, as she climbed into my lap to unwrap our new, old, sad, wonderful tree.
